


Do You Care?

by tuppenny



Series: All Ways [4]
Category: Newsies!: the Musical - Fierstein/Menken
Genre: Discussion of Parental Death, F/M, Fights, Fluff and Angst, Mentions of Death, references to period-appropriate antisemitic violence, there's a brief description of pogroms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-19
Updated: 2019-04-19
Packaged: 2020-01-16 07:16:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18516556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tuppenny/pseuds/tuppenny
Summary: Davey and his girlfriend react very differently to news of Mark Twain's death.





	Do You Care?

**Author's Note:**

> If discussions of death bother you, this whole fic is going to be a bad read. 
> 
> If you're worried about the descriptions of violence, then skip the paragraph that starts with this line: _“That’s probably for the best; it’s not a pleasant topic,”_ and you should be good.

**April 22, 1910**

“Extra, extra! Tragic misfortune befalls beloved author Mark Twain, giant of American literature! All the details here!”

David detached his arm from Chaya’s long enough to buy a copy from the newsboy on the corner, tipping him an extra penny and nodding briefly at the boy’s startled thanks. 

“He did not think you had enough money to tip him,” Chaya noted, watching the newsboy flip the penny into the air before shoving it in his pocket and pulling out another paper to wave.

Davey gave a wry smile. “Well, that’s because I don’t.”

She gave him a sharp look and then sighed, a mix of exasperation and fondness, before reaching into her bag. “Here.”

Davey stared uncomprehendingly at the sandwich in her hand. “What’s that?” 

“Your lunch,” she said, brandishing it at him. “Since now you cannot afford to buy one.” 

“Chaya, I couldn’t possibly take your—”

“I made it for you,” she interrupted, “So take it.” 

“What?” 

She rolled her eyes. “This happens every day, David. You use your lunch money to tip the newsies, you skip lunch, and you spend the afternoon with a growling stomach.” He began to protest, but she waved the sandwich at him as a signal to stop. “There is no use denying it, _motek_ ; you are getting skinny. Put some meat back on those bones, _na_? Besides, it is rye bread—your favorite.”

“Any bread you make is my favorite,” Davey said, reluctantly –and gratefully– taking the food from her.

“I know,” she smiled. “Now read me the headlines, okay?”

He steered them over to a bench and flipped the paper open, his face falling as soon as he saw the lead story. “Mark Twain Is Dead at 74,” he read, his voice heavy. “Oh, that’s sad.” 

“Mmm,” Chaya hummed. “What else?”

“It doesn’t matter what else,” Davey said, setting the paper aside and staring off into the distance. “That’s all the news I can take for today. I don’t want to know anything more.”

“What?” 

“Mark Twain is a wonderful and famous American author,” David explained. “This is such a loss to literature.” 

“I know who Mark Twain is,” Chaya said sharply. “I’m an immigrant, not an idiot.”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” David protested. “You just didn’t seem sad, and then you said ‘What,’ so I thought maybe you were asking who he was.”

“I worked as a librarian for several years,” she pointed out. “Of _course_ I know who Mark Twain is.”

“You worked in a _law_ library, not a standard library,” David said, trying to explain himself. “But still, Chaya, it was an innocent assumption—” he let out a frustrated noise. “Geez, I wasn’t trying to insult your intelligence—I was trying to make sure you didn’t feel like I was purposely talking over your head!” 

“Okay,” Chaya said, her feathers still ruffled. She smoothed down her skirts as David crossed his arms defensively over his chest. “Well, I know who Mark Twain is.”

“Noted,” David said sullenly. 

Chaya bounced her leg a few times, then turned to David. “So, what are the other headlines?” 

He handed her the paper without saying a word, too annoyed to make eye contact.

She raised an eyebrow at his behavior and then began to read. “ _Dear Cotton Hits Big Firm. Turbulence in Parliament. Ovation in Paris to Mr. Roosevelt_ —oh, that’s nice, isn’t it?” She looked at him expectantly, aware of his personal history with the current president, and frowned to see no reaction from him. She shook the paper to snap it up straight in front of her and continued. “ _Time We Awoke to Oriental Progress. Untermyer Sues Peabody for Libel. Fred Gebhard Near Death; Former Well-Known Society Man Suffering from Pneumonia_.” She snorted. “Look, someone else is dying—are you going to sulk about that, too?”

“I’m not sulking!”

She gave him a scornful look.

David glared back.

She waved her hand at him, gesturing to his slumped posture. “Sulking. Sulking about someone you’ve never even met.” 

“I don’t have to have met him to be sad that he’s dead!”

“He was old!” She shot back. “He was old, and he wanted to die!” She jabbed her finger at a section of the article and, seeing no change in his expression, began to read it aloud. “‘ _Albert Bigelow Paine, his biographer to be and literary executor, who has been constantly with him, said that for the past year at least Mr. Clemens had been weary of life.’_ ” She raised her eyebrows at him and then continued. “‘ _When Richard Watson Gilder died, he said: “How fortunate he is. No good fortune of that kind ever comes to me_.”’”

Davey gave a strangled laugh. “Witty even in the face of tragedy. The world is poorer without him in it.”

Chaya growled and shoved the paper back over at him. “What is _wrong_ with you? The man had a full life, and it ended peacefully. He had a successful career, more money than Midas, and a family who adored him. He had it all, don’t you think?” She stood up and slung her bag back over her shoulder. “So he’s dead now. Why do you care?”

“Why do I care?!” Davey shot upright, towering over the diminutive Chaya. “A giant of American literature and humor and society is gone forever. Sure, he lived a full life, but I’m allowed to miss him, to mourn the books he could have written that I’ll never get to read, to wish I’d heard the jokes he might have made to satirize the injustice and hypocrisy in the world, to be sad that—that I’ll—to be sad that I’ll never experience the enjoyment I’d have gotten from hearing about what he was up to next!”

“Bah!” Chaya jerked her head away from him.

“Nothing to say to that, hmm?” David pressed, following up on his perceived advantage. “Realizing that maybe I’m not actually in the wrong here? That maybe it’s okay to have a few real-life _feelings_?”

Chaya whirled back to face her boyfriend. “We all die, David! We all die someday, and only the very lucky ones die comfortably and peacefully and _old_. His death was a blessing—a _gift_ —and I refuse to be upset over such a privileged end!”

David threw up his hands. “Have a heart, Chaya! A man is dead, and you’re faulting me for caring? Sometimes I wonder about you, you know—I’ve seen how you brush off things like this, how you sit stone-faced at funerals and slip away or go utterly silent when anyone starts talking about tragedy—is there anything at all inside that chest of yours, or is it just dark and cold and empty?” 

Her eyes grew wide and she clenched her fists. “How dare you,” she said, switching into Yiddish, her voice growing louder and deeper. “How _dare_ you accuse me of—” She sucked in a deep breath and closed her eyes before releasing it slowly. “No. You know what? I refuse to discuss this with you anymore. I’m leaving. I have more important things to do today, and you’re keeping me from them.”

And with that, she spun on her heel and walked away, leaving David angry and alone.

 

*

 

Davey caved first.

To be fair, he had a family pushing him to make amends, which Chaya most certainly did not. And his family went to work on him almost immediately, too; his mother had observed the slight crease between his eyebrows and his even-more-than-usual quietness and ferreted out the problem within two hours of his return home that evening. She counseled him to forgive and allow himself to be forgiven, which Davey replied was easier said than done, and then Sarah had sagely advised him that communication was the key to a good relationship, while Les reminded him that he’d probably die alone if he didn’t patch things up with the only girl he’d ever managed to go out with more than twice. David laid facedown on the Murphy bed that he shared with Les and yelled in annoyance, which prompted his father to come pat him on the back and tell him that anger poisoned us from the inside out.

So maybe Davey was knocking on the Rosenfelds’ apartment door for largely selfish reasons, sure, but he reasoned that Chaya wouldn’t know that. He’d apologize for… being a human being with feelings? For caring about other people? For not being a robot? Hmm. Well, he’d apologize for something, anyway. The situation seemed to call for it, and once she opened the door, he’d still have at least a couple of seconds to invent something plausible. And then he’d be the bigger person, which would shame her into apologizing, too, and then his family would get off his back and he could eat dinner without a lecture on being just as stiff-necked as his ancestors who’d wandered around in the desert for forty years, and deserts were _hot_ , Dovid, so he’d better think twice about being such a stubborn boychik…

“Hi,” Davey said, looking down at Chaya, who was now standing warily in front of him, a broom in her hands, her unwashed curls flattened under a headscarf. He swallowed, then switched self-consciously into Yiddish. “Uh… We left things in kind of a bad place this morning.”

She snorted.

“And _so_ ,” David continued, nettled that she wasn’t reciprocating, “I came to apologize.”

“Apologize for what?” She asked, still not inviting him in. 

 _Darnit, I thought I’d have a little more time to think about that…_ “Um.”

“Your family made you come down here, didn’t they,” she said, starting to smirk.

“No!” She raised an eyebrow at his quick reply. “No, really, they—well, they suggested that I—” he sighed, seeing her eyes beginning to crinkle in amusement. “Okay, fine. Yes. Basically.”

She laughed. “Come sit while I finish cleaning. My father won’t be home for a little while, so we have time.”

Davey nodded and rubbed at the back of his neck. “I should’ve prepared something to say, because I honestly don’t know what I’m supposed to apologize for.” He pulled a rickety chair out from the table and then paused. “Can I help clean?”

She smiled but waved him off. “Thank you, but no. Continue talking.”

He sat and ran his tongue over his dry lips. “I just… I’m allowed to have feelings, Chaya. There’s nothing wrong with being sad that someone I admire is dead, even if I’ve never met that someone. His books are really important to me—reading them made me feel American, you know? Like I understood this country better and could maybe even be a part of it. I’m not going to apologize for caring, even if you don’t think I should.” 

She stopped sweeping and fiddled with her headscarf. “It’s not that I don’t think you should care,” she said, weighing her words before she said them. “And on some level I think it’s sweet that you do. It’s nice. It’s tender-hearted. I… well, I think the problem is more that… I simply don’t understand _why_ you care.”

He knit his brows together. “Doesn’t death make you sad?”

“Not always.” Davey blinked, and Chaya leaned the broom up against the wall and sat across the table from him. “Okay. So what I’m about to say is probably going to sound awful to you, and I know that. And I don’t want you to think poorly of me, but I suppose you already do, so I… I guess I have nothing to lose, since you already think I’m a robot with no emotions…”

David colored and winced. “I don’t actually think that, you know.”

“Oh, great, well, you’re about to,” she joked, though they were both too nervous for it to land properly. “Um.” She twisted her hands nervously in her lap. “Death makes me sad sometimes, like when it happens to a child or someone too young to be gone or someone other people depend on, but when old people die I just… I don’t care.” She looked down at her apron and bunched the material tighter and tighter.

“Alright,” David said, keeping his gut reaction in check and exhaling slowly. “I’m listening. Can you explain that a little more, please?”

She bit her lip and thought for a moment. “I… I didn’t always feel this way, but… there’s so much death in the world, and so much sorrow among the living… Have I told you that we moved to America because of the pogroms?” David shook his head no and Chaya shrugged. “Well, we did. Your mother said that’s why your family left Poland, too, yes?” 

“That’s right. My parents don’t talk about it with us, though, so the three of us kids only know what we’ve overheard, and that isn’t much.” 

“That’s probably for the best; it’s not a pleasant topic,” she said, a slight shiver running through her. “Men on horseback riding into the shtetl, torching houses with families inside, cutting villagers down as they ran to escape the fire… Sometimes they’d comb through the barnyards to find people who’d hidden under the hay or in the stalls, and then they’d drag them out to beat them to death. Babies were thrown against walls and under horses’ hooves. Grandparents and great-grandparents were gutted like fish and tossed aside. Parents, children, cousins, friends, all of them screaming, running…” 

She trailed off and lifted her eyes to his. “And then we escaped, and we came here, and my mother—my beautiful, strong mother, a woman who had survived the horrors of the Old World and brought us all to the promise of the New—she got sick. And after six months of suffering on a squalid mattress in a windowless room, she died. No rhyme, no reason, just dead. She’d made it through so many horrors, and then her luck ran out. Never mind that she had two young daughters who still needed her, a husband who barely knew how to light the stove, and a household destined to fall apart in her absence. Illness doesn’t care about the people it leaves behind; it strikes and it takes and that’s that. She was so young, too…” 

Chaya blinked rapidly, perhaps to hide the tears that Davey thought he saw forming just above her lower lashes. “Well. I know that families are sad when their grandparents die, and intellectually, I understand why. But it’s very hard for me to care about dead people I never met who lived full lives. And you know what? Even if it were possible for me to get back to a place where I could care, I’m not sure I’d want to. Death is all around us, and if I got upset about every single strike it made, I would never smile again.”

She dropped her gaze to the floor. “So. Now you know. Perhaps I used to care too much, and now that well has run dry. Perhaps I am truly as unfeeling as you say. Or maybe I just know that I can’t care about as many things as you do as deeply as you do, because the weight of those feelings would break me.” She shook her head. “I just can’t do it, David. I’m sorry if you think less of me because of that, but this is how I am, and I cannot change it.”

Davey took a deep breath, trying to process what she’d said. “Okay. I hear you. But I’m going to need some time to think about all of that,” he admitted. “It was… a lot.”

She pressed her lips together, trying not to snap at him for needing time, trying not to yell about how he'd _asked_ her to tell him all of this, but… she kept herself to a curt nod. 

“It makes sense,” he said, his eyes focused on the ceiling in a way that indicated his thoughts were running a mile a minute. “It makes intuitive sense, given what you’ve experienced… and maybe there are some temperamental factors involved, too, along with socialization and modeled behavior…”

She crossed her arms. “Oh, I’m sorry; I thought you were a lawyer, not a doctor. My mistake. You’re clearly qualified to analyze me to my face.” 

David’s attention snapped back to her as he flushed a violent tomato red. “Sorry.”

“Mhmm,” she said, her tone sour.

“I got carried away,” he said sheepishly. “I’m not trying to play Freud here.”

“Good.” 

“I’m trying to phrase what you’ve said in a way that I can understand,” he explained. “I haven’t been through the things that you have. I haven’t seen death to the extent that you have. I was born here, I never knew my grandparents, and most of my aunts and uncles and cousins are alive and well here in the city. So I guess that’s why I still have the… well, the ability to care about things that are kind of… unimportant? I’ve definitely had it easier than you, so I guess I’m… softer.” He grimaced. “Weaker.” 

She laid a tentative hand on his knee. “You’re not weaker, and you've had your own hard times. It's not a competition. And sure, maybe some of the things that make you sad seem unimportant to me, but if they affect you…” She furrowed her brow. “Well, I guess…. I mean, that’s okay. It’s not a bad thing. My sister is more like you—she cares a lot about oh-so-many things—and I love her more than anyone else in the world. She doesn’t force me to be softer, but she shows me that it’s possible, and sometimes…” Chaya smiled, gently squeezing his knee. “Sometimes I get it.”

He smiled back at her. “So you don’t think I’m a big baby?” 

She shook her head. “No. And I’m sorry I got mad this morning.” 

“I’m sorry I got mad, too,” he said, his eyes softening. “And I’m sorry I said you didn’t have feelings. I said it because I _know_ you have feelings, and I wanted to hurt them. To hurt… you.” He winced. “Oh, it sounds awful out loud. It was awful in the moment, too, huh?” 

She laughed. “Yes, but I think I gave about as good as I got.” 

“That’s for sure,” he said, grinning.

“David—I don’t think I’ll ever be able to care about people as much as you do,” Chaya confessed. “Honestly, I can’t even promise you that someday I’ll be able to care more than I do now.” David nodded almost imperceptibly, and she continued. “But I really will try to understand why things matter to you, and I won’t get mad at you for caring.”

“And I won’t get mad at you if you don’t care,” he said, his affection for her warming his voice. 

She beamed, and then her eyes widened when she glanced at the window and noticed the slant of the sun. “Ah! You know who will get mad at you—at both of us? My father! You have to go.”

“Oh!” He sprang up out of the chair. “Right. I’ll—I’ll see you tomorrow, yes?” 

“I’ll have your sandwich ready,” she teased, shooing him out of the apartment.

“Goodbye, Chaya,” he said, lingering on the doormat, drinking in her animated expression, the curve of her hips, the blush of her cheeks. 

“Goodbye, Dovid,” she said fondly, and then, her dark eyes twinkling, she blew him a kiss and shut the door.

**Author's Note:**

> All the headlines that Chaya reads out are from [that day's actual New York Times](https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1910/04/22/104930364.html?action=click&contentCollection=Archives&module=LedeAsset&region=ArchiveBody&pgtype=article&pageNumber=1). The italicized article quotations are, too. Before I looked up the actual headline about Mark Twain's death, I wrote “Mark Twain Dead at 74.” Turns out the genuine NYT headline was “Mark Twain Is Dead at 74.” I’d be a great obit headline writer!
> 
> Definition of motek is [here](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=motek).


End file.
